El Chapo ISIS Hoax: How One Small Blogger Fooled Fox News And The New York Post Into Reporting A Fake Story
A hoax claiming that El Chapo was taking on ISIS spread across the internet on Thursday, with one small blogger somehow fooling Fox News and the New York Post into thinking the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel was planning to take on the Islamist terrorist group.
The story claimed that Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of one of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartels, issued a sharp warning to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The message allegedly came from a leaked email, with El Chapo telling the ISIS leader “you are not soldiers” and adding that his group is “nothing but lowly p***ies.”
El Chapo was reportedly angry that ISIS destroyed one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s drug shipments in the Middle East, where the Mexican group reportedly engages in a lot of drug business.
The story was fascinating, two of the most notorious and ruthless leaders from across the globe seemingly coming into conflict. It seemed like something out of a movie, with the super-villains pitted against each other.
But there is a good reason it seemed that way — the El Chapo vs. ISIS story was entirely a hoax. It first came from a small site called Cartel Blog, where the author claimed that the email was somehow intercepted.
“It turns out a Mexican blogger leaked the message after it was sent email encrypted directly to the Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, a prominent ISIS leader,” the unnamed author wrote. “The blogger has intimate ties with actual Sinaloa cartel members, so it looks as if the warning is indeed legit.”
‘El Chapo’ threatens #ISIS: ‘My men will destroy you’ – https://t.co/1k8Na9tRCI pic.twitter.com/akJqyy9XU9
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) December 10, 2015
No, the world’s biggest drug dealer has not declared war on Isis https://t.co/Kk6iEdzAa1
— The Independent (@Independent) December 11, 2015
But the Washington Post dug further, finding an even stranger source to the email. It apparently first appeared on a website called Thug Life Videos, which includes both real news an Onion-style satire.
The problem, the original author Steve Charnock wrote, was that he didn’t make the story seem crazy enough to stand out as a fake.
“We write funny ‘satire’ stories occasionally which we assume are taken as jokes, and generally they are,” Charnock told Snopes. “Maybe I didn’t make this El Chapo story funny or weird enough, though. Or I just have an uncanny ability to ape how Mexican drug cartel kingpins talk.”
According to Charnock, El Chapo sounds like the typical gangster. The leaked email contained almost cartoonish threats, with El Chapo threatening to destroy ISIS.
“The world is not yours to dictate,” ThugLife reported the kingpin as saying. “I pity the next son of a whore who tries to interfere with the business of the Sinaloa Cartel.”
So how did the story make it to real news outlets like Fox News? For one, stories about El Chapo have been wildly popular. The Sinaloa Cartel leader made a daring prison escape earlier this year, breaking out through a mile-long tunnel and then flying in a helicopter back to Sinaloa territory. His status reached something of legend, with fake stories along the way like a reported threat to kill Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
And creating imaginary conflict between ISIS and Mexican cartels has been a popular theme in other stories. In 2014, a hoax circulated claiming that ISIS was trying to infiltrate the United States through Mexico, but that cartels were planning to fight back.
That story reached the edges of the media, with reports in smaller outlets and blogs. But the El Chapo ISIS hoax may be the first instance of a hoax reaching so far into the mainstream media.
[Picture by John Moore/Getty Images]
